Daily Inspiration Quote by Sonia Sotomayor

The line lands like a polite warning and a quiet indictment: even the people paid to be neutral are human first. Sotomayor isn’t claiming that facts are fake or that law is just vibes. She’s pointing to a more unsettling reality inside supposedly objective institutions: attention is selective, and selection is shaped by biography. The verb choice matters. Judges don’t merely interpret facts; they "choose to see" them. That phrasing turns objectivity from a default setting into an active discipline - and implies it can fail.

The subtext is a rebuke to the myth of the disembodied judge, the robe as eraser of class, race, gender, illness, grief, luck. In legal culture, bias is often treated as an aberration: a corrupt judge, an overt bigot, a conflict of interest. Sotomayor widens the frame. She suggests bias can live in ordinary perception - what feels plausible, what reads as threatening, whose pain registers as credible, whose story sounds "coherent". The "facts" that enter a decision aren’t only discovered; they’re prioritized.

Contextually, it’s hard to miss the debate around empathy and judging that flared during Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination and throughout her career. Critics often caricature empathy as soft or partisan, as if recognizing lived experience is the same as abandoning the text. Sotomayor flips that script: pretending experience doesn’t matter is the real ideological move, because it smuggles in one experience - usually the dominant one - as if it were just "the facts". Her intent reads as both humility and accountability: the law’s legitimacy depends not on denying subjectivity, but on managing it honestly.